Stuff

We are still in the period when no one really should be publishing any polls, since the fieldwork would have had to have been done over the Easter weekend. Here’s some things to keep you amused.

Firstly, over at the Election Guide part of the site I have – by popular demand – added the Northern Ireland seats. The boundary review in Northern Ireland makes very little difference to the overall picture, but for those who want to discuss seats in Northern Ireland the pages are here. As ever, I should recommend Nicholas Whyte’s site here, which has all the information on Northern Irish psephology you could possibly want and was a great help.

Secondly, there is rarely any polling done at all for local authority elections, except occassionally for the London borough elections when there is a nice geographical area where you know everyone has local elections at the same time. If you are hoping for polls on the May 2008 local elections you are probably going to be disappointed (apart, of course, from the London mayoral elections). What we do normally get are predictions from Rallings and Thrasher based on local authority by-elections, and some of their first predictions for the local elections have been published in the Local Government Chronicle, reproduced on LabourHome here.

Finally, for those of you pondering when we will get a proper poll, if everything goes according to normal timetables the monthly YouGov poll for the Telegraph should appear tonight or tomorrow. This should be an interesting poll – the last YouGov poll showed a 16 point Tory lead, a result that appeared to be an obvious rogue until ICM produced a 13 point Tory lead a few days later. The monthly YouGov/Telegraph poll will be our first chance to see if those huge Tory leads were the beginning of some sort of sea-change in British politics, or just a short-term negative reaction to the budget.